Author Guest Post with Donovan Hufnagle: These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them)

Echoing Chuck Palahniuk’s statement. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known,” this collection explores identity.

Welcome to the November 21st stop on the blog tour for These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them) by Donovan Hufnagle with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

My first two books The Sunshine Special and Shoebox focused on the journey of others. The Sunshine Special is a poetic narrative journal that documents the train travels of an eighteen-year-old, my great uncle, in the summer of 1920 from Fort Worth to Los Angeles. Francis’s exploration of new frontiers is also his exploration into his own internal struggles with family and manhood. Shoebox is an epistolary, poetic narrative about Juliana, who was adopted from Russia as an infant and who now struggles with mental and physical illnesses. My third collection 30 Days of 19 are observational inversed haiku (Naigai ni Haiku) poems written during the first 30 days of the covid quarantine. And my fourth book Raw Flesh Flash: The Incomplete, Unfinished Documenting Of is a poetic scrapbook of “tattooed bodies and the stories that they tell.”

Before my current book These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them), I found comfort in hiding behind the stories of other people, behind observations of things distant from me. And though all my poems, in some fashion, reveal aspects of myself, my current book is probably the most personal and such, the most exposing. Many of the poems come from my own history and journeys—love and hate…pleasure and pain. From childhood to adulthood. From being fathered to being a father. These are truths that I thought I would never write and as the poem “Mindset” states,

Sometimes I wish my mind was perforated,
memories easily torn away.

All the poems illustrate my growth and journey as a writer. Some personal, others showcase my interests in documentary poetry. For instance, sprinkled throughout the book are poems that use the words from the WPA narratives documented during the 1930s. A stanza from “‘WPA Road’ Or The Other Side of Etiwan Island: 

Their voices ringing out cheerfully in the crowed
air. All of them had long handled shovels in their hands,
the men who work on the Etiwan WPA road.

Some poems sing the blues while others cry to Korn’s “Dead Bodies Everywhere.” Some poems warship toys like GI Joe while others contemplate their feelings for Cosby’s Brown Hornet. From Batman and the Joker to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, these poems tap into culture, home, and self and, hopefully, resonate genuine passion.

About the Book

These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them)
by Donovan Hufnagle

Published 22 July 2024
Resource Publications

Genre: Poetry
Page Count: 106
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Echoing Chuck Palahniuk’s statement. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known,” this collection explores identity. These poems drift down rivers of old, using histories private and public and visit people that I love and loathe. Through heroes and villains, music and cartoons, literature and comics, science and wonder, and shadow and light, each poem canals the various channels of self and invention. As in the poem, “Credentials,” “I am a collage of memories and unicorn stickers…[by] those that have witnessed and been witnessed.”

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Excerpt

[Big Tony] or Those Girls

Those girls up at Reliable’s were funny as hell.
Ask them, darn near any one of them, where’d they work.
They didn’t want anybody to know; they didn’t tell.

“Oh, I’m the switchboard operator,” they’d say. “I dwell
in the office.” Ashamed, see. Fibbed like clockwork.
Those girls up at Reliable’s were funny as hell.

Say, they’d even ring their boyfriends the sound of that bell.
All those dumb dames putting on an act, shoveling that murk.
They didn’t want anybody to know; they didn’t tell.

When the girls come out, Big Tony wisecracked about the swell
switchboard operators. They put their foot in it, so they just smirked.
Those girls up at Reliable’s were funny as hell.

He hung around with his gang; they were in on it as well.
When the girls come out, they talked real loud like fireworks.
They didn’t want anybody to know; they didn’t tell.

Tony laid it on thick! How he laid it on well!
He pretending he didn’t know the girls was lurking.
Those girls up at Reliable’s were funny as hell.
Why they didn’t want anybody to know, they wouldn’t tell.

About the Author

Donovan Hufnagle is a husband, a father of three, and a professor of English and Humanities. He moved from Southern California to Prescott, Arizona to Fort Worth, Texas. He has five poetry collections: These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them), Raw Flesh Flash: The Incomplete, Unfinished Documenting Of, The Sunshine Special, Shoebox, and 30 Days of 19. Other recent writings have appeared in Tempered Runes Press, Solum Literary Press, Poetry Box, Beyond Words, Wingless Dreamer, Subprimal Poetry Art, Americana Popular Culture Magazine, Shufpoetry, Kitty Litter Press, Carbon Culture, Amarillo Bay, Borderlands, Tattoo Highway, The New York Quarterly, Rougarou, and others.

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